Yeah, but that’s good, because it’s pleasant walking-around weather for the thousands of visitors (it hit 60 the other day), and the indoor venues are, duh, indoors, so it doesn’t matter where they are built, and the Caucasus mountains are less than an hour away for the snow sports. Not that real snow is so plentiful there this year; for real snow you have to go to Georgia (the US one). And the Carolinas. Although I guess that blast has turned to ice by now. Which is worse. Oh, and the Midwest. And the East. And especially the Northeast.

Anyway, Hunter’s post is largely about the risks involved in constructing all the venues in a spot where the building sites are wetlands, and flooding and earthquakes and landslides are a big risk.

Knight Science Journalism Tracker Charlie Petit reports that Brainard, having been at the job only a few weeks, isn’t yet sure what changes he wants to make. Managing the existing stable of 40 bloggers must be a job and a half all by itself.

Charlie also quotes Brainard thus, “I think blogs provide a broader and deeper exploration of the sciences than has ever really been available to consumers of news and information.” About that, Brainard is quite right. Out of the chaos the Internet has visited on the publishing business has emerged, mirabile dictu, a Golden Age for science writing and science journalism, and much of it–maybe even most of it–is coming from science blogs and science bloggers. There are thousands, and I have been dipping into them every week here at On Science Blogs since 2009. Whew.

At Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende shows us the startling brain design of John Fairbairn’s helmet for the Skeleton competition. Given the recent attention to the risks of concussion in sports, this design is a bit unsettling. And for the Skeleton competition? Maybe he’s thumbing his nose at fate?

The Sochi Olympics: Physics, chemistry, and math in winter sports

The National Science Foundation has collaborated with the educational arm of NBC to produce 10 short videos explaining the physics, engineering, chemistry, design and math involved in winter sports. They cover slopestyle, half-pipe, speed-skating apparel, recovery from injury, the science of ice and snow, bobsled, alpine skiing, the physics of figure skating, and how movement in all these sports relates to robot design. Find all the videos here.

No mention in that post of NBC Olympics impresario Bob Costas’s pink eye, which forced him to give up the throne to Matt Lauer. “As a practical matter, I simply couldn’t do my job because my eyes had become so blurry, watery and sensitive to light,” Costas said in a statement released by NBC. Conjunctivitis has many causes; docs have said his is probably viral. At LiveScience, Rachael Rettner explains why pink eye is so contagious.

Credit: YouTube screen grab VIA LiveScience

And see Star Lawrence at HEALTH’Sass for a literally colorful description of what pink eye feels like and what the green glop it produces looks like, plus the word on treatment and prevention. The take-away on prevention: Stay away, far away, from people with pink eye. I bet public health folks are emplaning to Sochi even as we speak to study its spread. Star’s conclusion, based on personal experience, “This is gross, but not the end of the world.” Costas might disagree; as I write he has not yet returned to his Olympics post.

Sochi Winter Olympics: Political science

It’s not possible to write about Sochi and the Russian Olympics and Vladimir Putin without mention of international politics and human rights. At the anthropology blog Savage Minds, anthropologist Elizabeth Cullen Dunn explains, via a history of Russia’s centuries-long record of genocide in this region, that she won’t be watching Putin’s Olympics. That record includes the recent ethnic “cleansing” of 26,000 people in the South Caucasus. Sochi itself was a site of Russian genocide against hundreds of thousands of Circassians in 1864. Dunn says, “Like Hitler at the 1936 Olympic games, Putin hopes to use the Olympic moment to showcase his grip on power.”

Sister macaques Ningning and Mingming are the first primate GMOs whose genomes have been monkeyed with using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Credit: Cell, Niu et al.

How to rewrite genomes, our own included

These adorable monkeys are the first primate species to be genetically modified by a new technique called the CRISPR/Cas system. When I tell you CRISPR/Cas has generated unprecedented buzz among researchers, I hope you will understand that this is not hype.

The potential applications of the system are pretty-near unprecedented too. Genetic modification of any animal, any plant, and any microbe. “Smart bombs” that could destroy antibiotic-resistant disease bacteria without harming the good guys in your microbiome. The ability to study groups of genes to learn how they function together, which could identify real risk factors for complex disorders ranging from schizophrenia and autism to heart disease.

No, none is these things is possible at the moment, and yes, there is a distance to go. But the CRISPR/Cas system has been embraced by hundreds of researchers around the globe. And, oh yes, it’s simpler and cheaper than any other current gene-editing system.